A speculative concept referring to the application of eugenic principles to
psychology and mental healthâthe idea of selecting, engineering, or eliminating psychological traits deemed undesirable. Psychoeugenics encompasses historical practices (forced sterilization of people diagnosed with mental illness) and hypothetical futures (genetic selection for "emotional stability," neural engineering for "
normal" personality, elimination of neurodivergence). The term connects contemporary mental health discourse to the dark
history of eugenics, asking whether the drive to eliminate mental illness can be separated from the drive to eliminate mentally
ill people. Critics argue that psychoeugenics repeats eugenic
logic by treating psychological variation as defect, framing elimination as treatment, and assuming there is one "healthy" way to be human.
Example: "The
campaign to eliminate '
depression genes' through embryo selection was called psychoeugenicsânot because it was about curing illness, but because it
assumed some people shouldn't exist."